Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

SOC-STD 98WR Subject & Catalog Number

A common refrain both in the public discourse and within sociology courses is that race and ethnicity are social constructs. But what does it mean for race and ethnicity to be socially constructed, and what is the difference between those constructs in the first place? Students (and faculty), so ensconced within our disciplinary silo, often assume the social constructivist position is a settled matter. Empirical work demonstrates it is not. This course exposes students to debates about how sociologists conceptualize race and ethnicity and how those constructs are used as both tools and outcomes of analysis, focusing on quantitative methodology. We begin first with laying the theoretical foundation for race and ethnicity as ways of seeing the world—forms of “vision and division”—before evaluating the use of quantitative approaches to their study, focusing on examples across ethnoracial populations in the United States. The course has two core learning objectives: (1) expand students’ theoretical and empirical toolkits with respect to race and ethnicity and (2) develop the skills necessary to move from crafting a research question to writing an original piece of empirical scholarship. This is a junior tutorial.